A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

5 comments:

Steve Bannon is a complex character. It is insufficient to caricature him. There's a lot more there, and ignoring it will involving missing how he is likely to affect the Trump administration.

Perhaps most significant of the list is, "This is how Steve Bannon sees the entire world." It's toward the bottom, after Update. This is how he will be advising DJT. It's a transcript of his remarks to a conservative meeting at the Vatican. Bannon is tapped into an international movement. Think Opus Dei, for example. In fact, it is a lot closer to Opus Dei than neo-Nazism, even though he tolerates the later. This leads to the mistaken idea that he is promoting them, which is not the case, nor is Opus Dei.

To pass Bannon off as just some upstart bigot would be a monumental blunder. He is a traditionalist, who might get along pretty will with Alexander Dugin. The West portrays Dugin as a "fascist" but that is incorrect, too. Neither Bannon or Dugan are fascists in the mode of Germany under HItler or Italy under Mussolini. But they both espouse nationalism and traditionalism that seem close enough to be attractive to actual bigots — white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the like.

Bannon's failure, and that of DJT, is to have so far not categorically distanced themselves from the outright "deplorables," but rather to have welcomed their support by their silence on the matter. But both Bannon and Dugin speak to much wider and less extreme audiences that reject a Western liberalism that they view as having become degenerate and godless. The meaning of making America Great again, or Russia great again is abandoning both neoliberal globalization that is leading to slavery under an elite and a degenerate liberalism that has abandoned traditional values.

Also important is that Bannon's vision for Breitbart, which he still controls, is as an alternative to Fox News. Bannon is very smart, energetic, and knows exactly where he wants to go. Breitbart is a key tool in this international long term project of combining "Judaeo-Christianity" with what he views as capitalism, although his emphasis is on a Christian West. Bannon is a fierce critic of the Western "liberal" establishment, which is really neoliberal and corrupt, based on rent-seeking and crony capitalism. He stands in contrast to Libertarianism and Ayn Rand.

If all this seems like a lot, save some for the weekend. We had better know all we can about Steve Bannon as DJT's alter ego. Bannon is now being called Trump's Rasputin. Samantha Bee changed that to "Assputin."

2. Hjalmar Schacht came up with the plan to fund the reconstruction of Germany and its military through Mefo bills. The idea was to tie the funding to production so as not incur inflation, which injecting DM into the German economy directly without offsetting production was likely to do. A commenter pointed out DJT's plan to fund infrastructure with tax credits is similar.

If you read the articles I linked to in my comment above, you will discover that Bannon criticizes the transformation of the Goldman he worked for long ago into the vampire squid it later became after the changes in the regulatory structure that the financial industry had lobbied for. He mentions this transformation of finance as one of the chief reasons for his later activism.

Bannon's is the classic anti-semitic (and Nazi) reaction: he becomes aware of the evils of finance capitalism (Goldman Sachs), but instead of understanding that the problem is finance capitalism itself, he blames the evils on the Jews (Goldman Sachs).

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.